IFPRI: Ebola Outbreak Triggering West African Food Crisis

23 Oct 2014 --- While the health impacts of Ebola are devastating, this recent outbreak is triggering a food crisis that may persist for decades, posing significant challenges not just for food security in West Africa, but also for future economic growth, Shenggen Fan, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has warned.

Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were already experiencing food security issues before the outbreak, and undernourishment has long been a problem. Now, schools in these countries have closed, shutting down critical feeding programs for children.

“The costs of staple foods – including rice and cassava – are rising precipitously in the affected areas as farms are abandoned and as labor shortages grow. In addition, imported food is not making its way to rural areas due to restrictions on movement and rising transportation costs. So, as we cope with the health dangers of this dreaded disease, we must not forget the very real threats it poses to food security. The global community must come together to ensure that there are strategic food reserves and safety nets to protect not only those infected with the disease, but also those whose access to food is severely affected,” she notes.

In a blog, she warned that Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone were already experiencing food-security challenges before the Ebola outbreak. In Liberia in particular, about 30 percent of the population is undernourished—a statistic that has not changed since 1990. In all three countries, roughly 35 to 45 percent of preschool children are stunted as a result of being undernourished; these rates have also not changed much over the past 25 years.

Agricultural regions of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone have been hard hit by the Ebola epidemic. In Sierra Leone, the Ebola outbreak first emerged in Kailahun and Kenema—two of the country’s most productive agricultural areas for both the staple food (rice) and cash crops (cocoa and palm oil). According to initial reports by the World Bank, rice price increases of up to 30 percent have been observed in areas affected by Ebola. In Liberia, cassava prices have increased by up to 150 percent, according to a rapid market assessment conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“Why are food prices rising in these areas? In Kailahun, 40 percent of farmers have abandoned their farms for safer zones and 90 percent of plots there are uncultivated, according to FAO. For those that remain, quarantined zones and restrictions on movements have led to labor shortages during the harvest season for staple and cash crops. These factors lead to smaller harvests, which means less available food and higher prices,” Fan warned.

Fan made a number of recommendations for how to move forward:
• Strategic food reserves will be important to address the developing food emergency caused by the Ebola epidemic. A properly operated strategic grain reserve can provide a key level of defense against food insecurity and undernutrition in times of emergencies. Such reserves can be managed by the World Food Programme, which already has a global food management system in place. Also, while necessary precautions must be taken, trade should remain as open as possible so that net buyers in food importing regions have better access to food.
• Social safety nets will be needed to protect those who are most affected by the Ebola epidemic. These safety nets, which could be in the form of cash or in-kind transfers (context-specificity is important here), should be accompanied with nutrition and health interventions. This is important, because investing in the nutrition and health of vulnerable populations could lower the mortality rate of diseases like Ebola, as nutritional status and infection are intricately linked. Social safety nets will also be crucial in the post-Ebola era to drive “reconstruction” efforts—not unlike after a conflict—to restart food production.
• Also critical are efforts to build in safeguards for the prevention and control of transboundary zoonotic diseases. The entire global community needs to do more to prevent future outbreaks of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, SARS, and Avian Flu.
• There also need to be greater investments to build global health security through research and development, as well as public health infrastructure. Such investments must come from governments as well as the international community—enhancing the capacity of developing countries to prevent or contain an epidemic like Ebola is a collective effort. In our increasingly interconnected world, animal-borne diseases such as Ebola could travel far across borders.